sabato 23 aprile 2016

Panini Football 76

In the season 1975/76, Panini published the first sticker album of the French league. Here we present this collection, which is the first of a long series that celebrates forty years of age with the current season 2015/16. This first album has a similar design of other Panini albums of that period released for other foreign leagues.

In the season 1975/76, Saint-Etienne won the third title in a row. In this album we find a young Michel Platini (21 years old with the shirt of Nancy), Carlos Bianchi (top scorer of the league with 34 goals for Stade de Reims), and Raymond Domenech (Lyon, future coach of the French National Team).

The album opens with the calendar of the season 1975/76 on the left page, while on the right page there is the foreword, table of contents and the first four stickers: the logos of the FIFA, UEFA, FFF (French National Federation), and UNEP (French Association of Professional Footballers). The 20 teams of Division 1 are then shown in alphabetical order, starting from Avignon and concluding with Valenciennes. Each team is displaced over two pages with a total of 17 stickers: the club badge, the coach, and 15 players. The team page includes also a brief description of the career and characteristics of coach and players.

The second part of the album includes three special sections: Football trophies, best world players, and football comic strips by Prosdocimi.

The section about football trophies includes table of honour and stickers of eight International competition: the World Cup, the Euro Cup, the Intercontinental Cup, the Champions Cup, the Cup of Cup Winners, the UEFA Cup, the Mitropa Cup, and the French Cup.

Quelques Grandes Figures du Football D'Aujourd'hui (Some big personalities of today football) includes 16 stickers of some of the best players of 1976 around the world. Among them we find Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Muller, Gianni Rivera, and Sandro Mazzola.

Bruno Prosdocimi (born in 1936) is an Italian painter and cartoonist. In the section Le Football vu par Prosdocimi (Football seen by Prosdocimi), he presents 32 stickers to illustrate football. They are about characters (the referee, the president, etc...) and actions of the game (offside, penalty, etc...).

Club badges of Football 76

Three big names of the first album of the French league: Carlos Bianchi, Raymond Domenech and Michel Platini